‘We're in the club forever': First-time Emmy nominees celebrate their moment in the spotlight

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They're the newest members of an elite club: Emmy nominees.
'I'm excited about it,' says Katherine LaNasa (The Pitt). 'I feel like it's a title you get to keep, like you're Lady so-and-so or Lord so-and-so. Now you get to be Emmy nominated so-and-so. I like that word. You don't even need to win. You still get to keep the title. So I feel like I already won.'
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That's a sentiment echoed by her fellow nominees Erin Doherty (Adolescence), Jenny Slate (Dying for Sex), and Michael Urie (Shrinking), who joined Gold Derby for our roundtable of first-time Emmy nominees.
'I actually think the prize is having an acting job, getting to go and be recognized and have your name called,' agreed Urie. 'We're in the club forever.'
After ample mutual admiration — 'I can't believe you weren't nominated before!' — they shared with Gold Derby their memories of Emmy nomination morning and the moments they're most proud of from their season.
How did you get the news?
LaNasa: We were on set, and we took a bathroom break, but I had to go back to work without knowing. And then my makeup artist who was also nominated came tiptoeing out. And she's like, 'You got nominated, too!' We just had this little moment. She's one of my favorite people. So it was really sweet.
Urie: We had a night shoot the night before, so I went to bed at 4 a.m. And so I was actually awoken by my phone buzzing on the nightstand and I thought, 'Well, this is somebody to commiserate or it's good news.' I saw that it was from my reps and so I didn't answer it. And then they called again, and it was real! It was pretty wild. That night we had another night shoot, and that ended up being the last night of our season. It was very, very special to get to immediately join everyone and all get to celebrate. I still can't believe we're talking about this right now. I can't believe this is a real thing. I had impostor syndrome.
Slate: I was not at work. I was at home in Massachusetts. My husband was away. I was with my daughter. When my husband goes away, I let my daughter sleep in our bed because I like to have her close just in case I have to tuck her under my arm and run away into the night. So my phone was on do not disturb. I went to acupuncture. I got poked. I chilled out. I worked out. The second that the childcare kicked in, I was like, I should check my phone. And then I saw a lot of text messages from my reps. And it sort of all flooded, like, my gosh, something is happening to me right now. The first person I called was Nikki Boyer, who I play on Dying for Sex. And we had a nice cry. And then I called my parents. I said to Dad, 'I've been nominated for an Emmy.' He goes, 'For what?'
Doherty: It was the day before my birthday, and I was like, 'I'm just gonna make a birthday cake.' I spoke to my agent that morning and she was like, 'Erin, it's fine. You don't have to engage.' I'll just give you a ring whether you've got it or not, I'll give you a ring. So I was mid-birthday cake baking when I got the call and I saw her name and I'm bad at picking up my phone at the best of times, even if it's someone I know, it's just an invasion. But it was good news and it was a wonderful birthday cake!
Is there a moment from your season that you're proudest of?
Urie: They put me in a storyline this season that was very unexpected. I play Jason Segel's best friend and I don't live there and I don't work with them. But this season, they stuck me right in the middle of a really major storyline with Brett Goldstein coming in as the man who incited the entire series, and they decided that my character, who is the least well-adjusted and the most outside of it all, be the conduit that brings him into the fold. I didn't expect that. It led to some very exciting things, including getting to keep the secret, it ended up being very moving and very hilarious. I got to do this huge confession rant monologue when it finally all came out. I never had anything like that on TV before where you got to just rant for two minutes. It was awesome to get something like that — that the writers see that you are capable of something like that and they give you this gift and they say, 'Yeah, go for it. We trust you.'
Slate: I don't exactly know how to pick just one, but there's a scene where Nikki slaps her own ass. I just really loved threading the needle in that moment, and I loved trying to figure out how to realistically perform shaking your butt, like shaking your own ass cheeks at an authority figure. It's pure comedy. That moment is like a pretty good example of something that I think we were trying to do a lot. It's not like the drama is the shot and the comedy is the chaser. These are all equal tones and they're all here because they actually all occur in real life and they occur simultaneously.
Doherty: I think as an actor going into it on paper, you're like, 'This is gonna be a really testing moment in my life.' But actually it was genuinely one of the most freeing experiences I've ever had. I feel like I will be chasing it for the rest of my days. I can't find any more words to capture what it was. It was being given the opportunity to hear the word action and to then let the script and the present moment do its thing. All I had to do was be a passenger on the train and I crave that. What felt really daunting at the start just immediately became a blissful exercise in trust.
LaNasa: If you work for John Wells, it is the best. We are completely set up to succeed. We're not overworked and we're completely respected. We get our scripts early, everything's amazing. In Episode 14, I got that one little scene. I got scene with the actor who plays Noah's stepson after he finds out that the girlfriend died. And I go over to him and I give him a hug. And I said, 'I'm going to make that the best scene I can make it.' And let me tell you, that scene is great. At this age, I kind of feel the most proud of how I can make things work. There's a lot of making everything work. There's no marks on my set and there's a lot of, I've got a guest star and I'm trying to speed them along with me, but I can actually slow them down by the way I slow my pace. There's a lot of moving cameras. It's a dance and I love that I can do that and act at the same time, which I wouldn't have been able to say, 20, 30 years ago. So that is kind of what I'm proud of. I'm proud of my facility.
How much freedom did you each have to make your characters your own?
Slate: I got incredible direction, but also total freedom — hopefully they're gonna sort of weave themselves together. The groundwork was so well laid by our writers. But I felt total freedom from Liz [Meriwether] and Kim [Rosenstock], our writers and showrunners. And from Michelle [Williams], in our pairing and I think she felt that from me, too. In fact, like, and we said very little to each other about how it would work. We're kind of just like going on our chemistry, but there was, I think, an understanding of, 'Whatever you need to do, you just do it and I'm gonna be there for that.' Nikki Boyer said that to me about playing her. That was also a gigantic relief to have that responsibility but to have freedom inside of that.
LaNasa: I feel like Dana just arrived. I feel like Dana just kind of arrived. Noah wrote this thing to all the actors, what they were looking for. It was about in the acting, they wanted like top-to-toe immersion, like that you were always in it. And I'm really interested in that. I always want to be living a believable moment with everything that I'm doing. He said, 'Leave your ego and bring your creativity.' But the character just kind of arrived. I went to the hospital, and she was just there.
Urie: I really like played the guy they wrote. I just trusted so much that if they were gonna find a place for someone like me in this world, that they had a point of view and an idea and I wanted to fit in and be cool and be with the big dogs. And so I kinda kept my head down and I got more and more scenes, and in season two I got all this great, really amazing stuff. We do some improv on the show — sometimes they'd be like, all right, so in this moment, everybody throw in a line. 'Michael, you're such a narcissist. Say something narcissistic.' I didn't even realize I was playing that! [laughs] But I think that's right because if you ask a narcissist, they don't really know that they're narcissists. And so I was all the way in.
Doherty: You're kind of only as good as your counterpart. Owen gave me the opportunity to go there as this woman because he was so generous in throwing me the ball. It was amazing that I kind of got to reignite that because it came from like a child actor, someone who had no preconceived notion about how this was gonna be received. It was just about, let's tell the story. And he was so just locked into that. I'm so chuffed because it brings you back to why you do it and why stories can be so resonant is because they can just be so human. Without him, I wouldn't have known those parts of my character.
This roundtable is presented by Apple TV+, HBO Max, FX, and Netflix.
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